I have a patient who is being healed by the remedy Nitric Acid. She hates a person who she sees regularly. She is very irritated by this hatred. People whose other symptoms heal from Nit-ac often have the tendency to hate certain other persons. This patient is a charming beautiful person, so this tendency is striking. She also suffers from a violent inflammation in another part of her body and Nit-ac quells this inflammation if she does not eat certain foods the also cause inflammation. But she is still in the process of healing.
She is unable to show him compassion because of this hatred. Not surprisingly, she is unhappy with the lack of compassion shown to her in her childhood by her relatives. But she does not relate her own suffering to the hateful image of this acquaintance.
I do not alway counsel patients. Certain spiritually oriented patients seem to use the awareness that remedies bring in a deep way. They pray, meditate, focus on awareness and with the right remedy, they are able to achieve much deeper results than the ordinary patient.
So I asked her to practice compassion on this hated person. Part of the argument that I presented to her is this unrelated, uncared for person is the child that she still brings with her to adulthood. His outside appearance is repulsive to her, but the inside is the same child who needs compassion. When we talk about compassion, she thinks about her goddess the Bodhisattva. In Buddhism, a Bodhisattva is an enlightened Buddha who elects to stay in this world to help suffering persons. We are taught to revere the compassion of a Bodhisattva. So, a Bodhisattva is an ideal compassion.
Contrary to this ideal, I convinced her to think of this unloved person as a vegetable that she might fail at cooking and throw away without shedding a tear. We had been talking about failing at cooking a vegetable dish in the conversation previous to this one. She does not love him, and she was not loved sufficiently, so she may not be very good at showing compassion. Most of us humans including me are like that, so she is not a peculiar person. So, practice on this vegetable, I suggested. This person who you don't care about is like a vegetable. If you fail to skillfully show compassion, throw that memory of failure and try again on the next suffering stranger. Or even better, eat your poor cooking and become better the next time you try.
This is an important practice because in the future, a person who you love will need compassion. This loved one will do something that is repulsive to you. With that person you don't want to fail to show compassion, so practice on a stranger first. Practice good cooking with easily available vegetables first.
Maybe I should suppress this desire to speed spiritual development. I should just wait for Nit-ac to work. But, I believe that a remedy has the power to bring awareness at a certain stage of spiritual development. Some homeopaths believe that a remedy cannot enhance spiritual development.
At another level, perhaps I am speaking to myself to encourage myself to practice compassion with my next patient who I may not like. I too have a child in me who feels that she did not receive enough compassion as a child. That child needs compassion and I can practice taking care of that inner child by showing compassion to the patient who I don't really like.
From a distance, compassion for ourselves, for strangers and for our loved ones are all the same. The external circumstances that cause us all to suffer are so different. So the many forms of suffering seem all so different. That is easy to understand in the abstract, but in daily life each of these instances feel and are lived very differently. So we continue to suffer endlessly.
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